The time is not yet

...It was also a measure of progress that they were seen as strong administrators in their own right in every way equal to their male contemporaries...

...and it is not insignificant...

...She is charming, a sought after speaker, in command of the issues, and has the Southern woman's gift of persuasion...

...Some women leaders now question Elizabeth Dole's resignation and the message it has for wives...

...The administration in appointing them ratified the feminist contention that wives had a right to jobs for which experience and training prepared them no matter who their husbands were...

...Well, yes, some...

...555...

...Piopte didn't expect die candidates themselvies to resign , she poiated out — nobody was urging George Bush to resign from die vice-presidency because he was campaigning for president...

...No, Elizabeth Dole will go back to work somewhere, somehow, and no one will be censorious or stirprised...

...And made it plain that what she would be doing would be no trivial "wifey" kind of campaigning...

...It was a measure of progress, women leaders* said, that these women could hold offices in the executive branch in which they might come into conflict with the legislative branch in which their husbands served — and not be seen as hurting their husbands politically...

...send me out on campaign for a year, then fold me and file me in a drawer...

...Elizabeth Dole, however, might just as well have inquired why no one had suggested that Senator Simon or Congressman Jack Kemp resign — there is nothing ceremonial about their roles or of the other congresspersons running for president either...

...She would make a twelve-state swing through the southern states with an eye on "Super Tuesday," dtp multiple primary scheduled next March 8. She would operate out of an office she herself would manage in Charlotte, N.C...

...A woman has been able to protest having to leave her work and has been generally understood and sympathized with...

...She had proved herself an asset in 1980, and will, they think, be a tremendous asset now...

...Can anyone doubt that some of the criticism aimed at Mrs...

...Party preferences aside, viewed objectively, Elizabeth Dole's credentials for executive office are impressive: she has experience in domestic areas of pressing interest — health, education, welfare, consumer problems, transportation — and a solid history in one of our most difficult foreign problems, trade...

...She is popular in her native South...

...She has enjoyed good relations with Congress and the business community...

...Has any progress been made...

...I love my job...

...In 1973 she was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission, from which she resigned to campaign for her husband's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1979...

...In 1980 she joined the Reagan White House as special assistant for public liaison, and in 1983 became secretary of transportation...

...There was pressure of a different kind from Dole supporters , who felt that the storms surrounding her department could affect the campaign adversely...

...Hence the pressure...

...And when she has done what she can for her husband, Elizabeth Dole will not have the bitter experience of which one political wife wrote only ten years ago — "I was needed all right — like a Barbie-doll who makes speeches...

...We will never know whether she ever gave a passing or serious thought to a possible candidacy of her own, but, of course, in the end it was never a real option...

...Elizabeth Dole is a woman with a government career history of her own...

...She would not have left the cabinet except for the most compelling of reasons she wrote President Reagan, "the need to elect a successor who can build on your administration's achievements...

...But jAc was being criticizedfor taking nine days of her vacation timelo campaign for hw husband, Senator Robert Dole...

...She did not want to...

...EUKfeETH DOLE STPS DOWN Wmoment came she put the possible face "there's nothing more important Than helping to choose the future leader of the free world," she said...

...First of all, we are told, from the campaign staff...

...We do know that she gave very serious'thought to staying in the important job she held and that it took real pressure to bring about her decision to leave it...

...sigh...

...Not so long .ago there was speculation — and it was not frivolous — as to which Dole might run for president...

...It all seems to prove that the time is not yet that a woman's right to her work is equal,to her husband's, if, that is, the two should seem to conflict in importance...

...A Harvardtrained lawyer, she has served under four administrations starting as staff assistant in Lyndon Johnson's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, later as legislative assistant to his consumer affairs adviser, and then as executive director of the President's Commission on Consumer Interest...

...She was a woman and a wife, and her husband wanted to run for president...

...It's.challenging, it's tough...

...Not so long ago, too, in articles and speeches on the changing status of women, the point was being made that, just as the Nixon administration had been able 4p dd what the Democrats did not, dare in normalizing relations with China, the Reagan administration had broken precedent in appointing the qualified wives of congressmen and public officials to high office...

...Dole was motivated by the fact that her high visibility in office was seen as added visibility for her husband...

...She surely felt the pressures of wifehood — a need to help her husband — and of tradition and family (she consulted her older brother before she acted...

...In several newspapers, including die New York Tbtut, it was rather unkindly pointed out that the parallel did notfcoW since the vice-president's office was largely ceremonial and hardly crucial, 554 whereas the secretary of transportation was involved in things vital to the nation like dealing with the troubled airline industry...

...True, there had been some talk before he withdrew for other .reasons about whether Senator Biden could handle the judiciary hearings and run, but that touches the other side of the coin — the possibility that publicity gained from holding office may hurt or enhance a candidate's chances, single him out of the pact, as it were...

...That is a gain...

...But, just days before, Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole, the only woman in the cabinet and a highly visible and popular .cabinet member, had been protesting the suggestions that she resign, Why- she wanted to know/is it spouses (and she might well have said female spouses) who are ftxpected & re...

...Of these, Dole was best known, but there were significant numbers of others, among them Lynne Cheney, wife of the Wyoming congressman, who heads the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Wendy Lee Gramm, wife of the senator from Texas, who is an administrator at the Office of Management and Budget...